Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)

The Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Formation") is a very short, dense and enigmatic Hebrew cosmological treatise, only some 1,600 to 2,500 words depending on the recension, describing how God created the universe through "thirty-two paths of wisdom": the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, mapped onto numbers, planets, months and parts of the body. Its authorship and date are genuinely uncertain and much argued.

Tradition ascribes it variously to the patriarch Abraham or to Rabbi Akiva, but these are legendary attributions; scholars place its composition anywhere from the second to the sixth century CE, in a milieu touching both rabbinic Judaism and late-antique Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism, and it circulates in several distinct recensions (a short version, a long version, and the one embedded in the tenth-century commentary of Saadia Gaon). It predates the developed Kabbalah by centuries and is not itself a Kabbalistic work in the medieval sense, but it supplied the later tradition with the word sefirot and with the idea of creation through letter and number, and drew a long line of commentators. The golem legends, in which a man is animated by combinations of the Hebrew letters, descend from its account of the creative power of the alphabet.

The Sefer Yetzirah is about sixteen hundred words long depending on the recension, which is shorter than this article and its neighbour combined, and it has generated a commentary literature of enormous size.

Its content is a cosmology built from two sets of things. There are the ten sefirot, here called sefirot belimah, described as depths or dimensions rather than as the divine attributes they became in later Kabbalah; and there are the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, divided into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples. Ten and twenty two together make the thirty two paths of wisdom with which the text opens. The letters are not symbols of creation in this account. They are its instruments, combined, weighed and permuted by God to make everything that is.

That doctrine, that reality is generated by letter combination, is the root of the entire later tradition of Hebrew letter mysticism, and it is also the root of the golem legends, in which a practitioner who understands the combinations makes a living thing. The atlas records the golem material elsewhere; the text underneath all of it is this one.

Three principal recensions survive, the short, the long and the Saadia version, and they differ enough that a commentator's argument often depends on which one is in front of him. Modern editions print them in parallel for that reason.